Sunday, June 8, 2008

So yes, as I alluded to before, I had plenty of time for worrying about my stuff and also my mover and also how bad a person I was, because it took a very long time to load the truck. Hours and hours, in fact. And BTG did an excellent job of keeping me calm. Two particularly strange things about my movers:

Periodically, The Guy and Preggo would just disappear. For a long time. Without saying anything. I assume they were taking well-deserved breaks, but it was odd how they would just vanish. Particularly since I had errands to run, but did not feel I could leave, since I never knew when they were leaving or returning.

Neither of them used the bathroom in my apartment once. This was probably taken care of on those breaks. But where did they go?

I did one thing almost absolutely right about this move. I packed a couple of weeks' worth of clothes, including work clothes, into one of my old camp trunk, and then I put everything I wanted to take in the car with me (cleaning supplies, for example, and toiletries, and the cable box I still needed to return) into the bathroom, out of the way of the movers. Brilliant, right?Except.Except I neglected to put that trunk into the bathroom, and so instead put it very close to the front door. Where it was probably one of the first seven things the movers put on the truck. Which I discovered only much later, while the movers were taking one of their mystery breaks.BTG and I ran outside to see if we could still see it, but we could not, and this hour-and-a-half move was already on about its fourth hour and the truck was about a third full. There was no way I was having them unload the truck at this point.So we went into the house, where my exhausted self freaked out a little more, and BTG sprang into action, grabbing any articles of clothing she could find still in the apartment to assemble a work wardrobe for me for my first week on the new job. That wardrobe consisted of a black velvet dress and a blue t-shirt.Hm.It got me laughing, which got me relaxed enough to call Kay Bailey and ask if I could borrow back some of the clothes I'd handed down to her about two weeks before. She let me. And then there was a lot more standing around, and a lot more waiting, and a little more freaking out.And then.And then it was about 5:30, and the apartment was close enough to empty that I felt like we actually might have only another hour and a half.And then.And then The Guy came back in to tell me that he was running out of room on the truck. I was mad, and I was tired, but I was calm."Take the furniture," I said. "I'll figure out what to do about the boxes.""I'm not going to be able to get all the furniture," he said.I stayed as calm as I could and pointed out the high-priority items. I was ready to disassemble and get rid of my bookshelves from Target, even though I loved them, because they'd be easily replaced. I could find a place in the car for my standing lamp, probably.And then he asserted that he didn't have room on the truck for my bed. You might think I'd be the kind of girl who'd have a big fancy bed, and you'd be right, except that I broke it a few years ago. So the bed that would not fit on the truck? Was what we call in my family a "Boston frame," and what they call an "Adjustable Metal Bed Frame," anywhere else. Yeah, the kind that folds up into a stick.With a beautiful "not my problem" shrug that I could not master if you were asking me to be concerned about what would happen to clippings of President Taft's hair, Preggo and The Guy got in the truck and left, around 6 or 6:30 Friday night. My apartment was not clean, I had not slept, the cable box was not returned, and I had easily five times the amount of stuff I could fit into my Oldsmobile, still in the apartment.

Oh, there was plenty of cool-losing, and plenty of griping and ranting. At some point, maybe BTG will chime in here, or the friends who will make their first appearance in Part 5.But yes. Cool was lost.